Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

How to Hire Great Inbound Marketers: Six Key Personality Traits

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Note: I originally published this post on LinkedIn. Inbound marketing requires certain skills – skills you may not have in your department. As it becomes an ever-larger part of the marketing mix, finding people who are good at inbound is going to become more important. But as buzzy as inbound marketing is, finding people who are good at it is not easy. How can that be? After all, it’s not like inbound was invented yesterday. The term ‘inbound marketing’ was coined by Hubspot’s Brian … [Read more...]

How to Fund a Channel Partner Program

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Though channel partners can buy products at discounted rates, vendors still need to invest to help them generate demand. There are three basic models for funding channel partner programs: market development funds, contra-revenue funds, and co-op funds. These are distinctive models, but businesspeople commonly confuse them. Therefore, you should be careful to specify to the partner exactly what kind of funding your company offers. Market development funds (MDF) are distributed to partners in … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: Why Are PR People Called ‘Flacks’?

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PR people have a hard job. Clients are never happy. Their story should have gotten more coverage. It was the agency's fault for not pushing hard enough. The agency can't easily tell their client that their story was a dud. Reporters see agencies as a necessary evil. PR staffers bring them stories, but can also be pushy. And truth be told, most reporters prefer finding their own stories. So it's no wonder PR pros have earned the pejorative 'flack,' as in "Tell that PR flack to stop … [Read more...]

The Importance of Matching Demand Generation with Sales Capacity

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When it comes to leads, most people assume more is better. That’s not always true. Sometimes you have more than your sales team can actually handle, in which case your leads go cold. The flip side—when you have more sales capacity than lead flow—is equally bad. This is why it’s so important to balance demand generation with sales capacity. Let’s take a closer look. Establishing Your Quarterly Demand Goals First off, you need to establish your desired lead flow. I like to model mine to be even … [Read more...]

Content Marketing Economics – Part II: Consumption and Profitability

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In the first part of this post, we discussed the production and distribution of content. Here, we’ll going to dig into how people consume your content, the desired outcomes of that consumption, and whether what it costs you is generating a profitable return. How does consumption relate to production and distribution? It can be represented by this simple equation: Consumption = Production * Distribution The better the quality of the content – the production – multiplied by a larger or more … [Read more...]